Well if you don't have to pay people then yah, revenue will go up for now.
Collect your bonus, get your stock, bail and move to the next job. Sell the stock before the damage you caused rears its head.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Finance should be banned
Just ban or heavily tax stocks.
Oh, billionaire just used stocks as collateral for his loan? 30% tax Selling or buying stock? 20% tax
Bring back pensions first then
Pensions? For billionaires?
401Ks have replaced pensions for most Americans.
No idea what that is. Sounds like it belongs with WH40K
So they used to have pensions for most private workers, then they went to 401Ks which are self managed market based retirement funds.
- The company has a management agreement with a brokerage (i.e. Fidelity) to manage the accounts and they pick which funds you can invest in.
- You allocate how much you contribute, up to the IRS max.
- Many companies give matching funds which means you get a 100% return on that amount right out of the gate.
- In good years you can do very well, far beyond what pensions would've given.
- The money is pre tax so you lower your income for tax purposes during your peak earning years.
- You can still save and invest anyway you want in addition to this (i.e. IRA). You can still collect social security.
Downside...
- You are limited in investments
- You are not guaranteed returns since you are at the mercy of the bond and equities (stock) market. You can lose money in bad years.
- You must pay income tax on it when you start taking distributions from it in retirement. The minimum mandatory distribution amount could push you into a higher tax bracket.
The big push away from pensions to 401Ks and IRAs means the market has become the main retirement savings for most Americans. Wall St and financial institutions love them because it pumped trillions of $ into the market and profits in fees into the financial firms. Companies no longer had to manage pensions and guarantee returns. Most gov jobs still have pensions.
Fucking suits.
Shit like this is why I had to learn the trades as backup while I was still in the game, in this case training to be a computer technician.
Part of me is glad I'm getting the hell out of this system in the near future. My heart goes out to younger people being royally screwed by it and I don't see any way out of it within that system.
I'm with you. After this position ends I'm changing careers. Tech has gone to shit lately.
Which system, specifically
American Capitalism 101. Sacrifice future growth for immediate profits.
This will continue to happen until sociopath executives see consequences.
Or, you know, workplaces organize and form strong labor unions?
dont work hard for companys, better they do more likely you will get laid off with everyone else. Might happen anyway, but if they dont do well they might think they actually need people to do work.
Who are you kidding?
Record profits > "We need to lay off workers to keep these numbers going up."
Not record profits > "We need to lay off workers to make these numbers go up."
CEO: I need the highest possible performance otherwise the board will fire me.
Board: We need the highest return otherwise we’re not willing to support the CEO.
Fund managers: We need to only invest in the most profitable ventures, otherwise people will move their money out of the fund I’m managing.
Pension companies: We need to only put our money in the most high performing funds.
You: I need the best return on my pension so I can retire as soon as possible.
If you’ve ever moved saved money to an account offering higher interest or performance, you’re part of this. I’m not saying that to blame, but people often don’t connect their own behaviour with the behaviour of the market.
I agree. The stock market was a mistake
Agreed. I participate as a thoughtless investor trying to maximize the growth of my savings but I hate that I have to even bother. Extra work, some guilt or anxiety around whether you made the right choices, and more complicated taxes. I think it’s horseshit that I’m effectively obliged to play in this casino the ruling class set up, just so my money retains its value against inflation.
I’m not against my money being used to grow businesses. But then just let the bank deal with it and pay me a fair interest rate for lending it to businesses. I still haven’t been given a good answer as to why the stock price of a company should have any effect on its day to day operations or revenue generation.
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my god we have so many layoffs this year.
we have so many layoffs this year.
And the year isn't even half over yet.
Just wait until the full impact of Trump's bullshit works its way through the economy.
The carnage will be felt for a decade or more.
What is the logical progression to this kind of a thing. Is there going to be a turning point or is bottom a long long way to go?
I’m just brainstorming here, but do layoffs pave the way for hiring new grads at entry level wages, with more cutting edge knowledge?
Sure, that overlooks the loss of tacit knowledge that keeps the company running. I haven’t actually figured out yet how large companies can keep packaging out their senior employees that glue their disorganized systems together with undocumented knowledge.
That's an interesting question. Either there isn't much tacit knowledge in the company that they can't put in onboarding documentation, or the company is focusing on short term gains at the cost of long term stability
Neither have the large companies. The only difference between you and them is that you have acknowledged this loss of knowledge.
This is just a game to them, they have nothing to lose no matter what happens.
The usual self-cannibalism game.
Meta is doing the exact same thing:
Mark Zuckerberg's social media giant will reportedly hand out roughly 8,000 pink slips on Wednesday, May 20, eliminating about 10% of its global workforce. Notably, though, these cuts will arrive on the heels of one of the most lucrative quarters in the company's history: $56.31 billion in revenue and $26.8 billion in net income for the first three months of 2026...
https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/meta-layoffs-8000-workers-zuckerberg-ai-spending
Slashing 10% of your workforce annually is something Jack Welch thought of when he was CEO of General Electric; essentially it shifts that 10% of staff overhead cost straight to profits per year.
The justification they give for the figure is that it's the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. What this effectively does is two fold:
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Anyone who's focusing on delivering stuff the company needs long term isn't always or sometimes never will produce nice neat KPIs that can be measured along with the rest of the company. This means these people are under constant pressure and can often get swept up in the firings.
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It makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool. Because everyone is automatically incentivised to deliver KPIs NOT the actual company deliverables that generate the added value and therefore the profit.
This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that's left of the company's institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.
If this AI fuelled trend keeps up then companies like Cisco and Meta will eventually implode at some point.
makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool
This came up recently elsewhere and is known as “Goodhart’s Law”
I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.
My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”
Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.
I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.
The grocery store I worked for, over 20 years ago, did something similar, with similar results. All it did was incentivize locking and unlocking the register as optimally as possible. They also tracked how often and when in the transaction you scanned the customer's loyalty card. It was to the point that basically cashiers who wanted to optimize their numbers wouldn't unlock the register until the customer had their loyalty card in hand.
This is the same grocery store chain that almost failed completely due to a impossible sales requirements in their meat department leading to redating meat and bleaching chicken to increase its shelf life. The company claims they never asked any of their meat departments to do anything like that, they just set impossible standards and held people accountable unless they were able to find a way to cheat.
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Yup. Not all value is easily and directly measurable. Trying to overmanage and only value measurable factors is incredibly counterproductive. But hey, that makes the stock price go up. So who cares about anything else.
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You better thank the Job Creators for the right to work, Serfs! Now go gratefully into the gig economy, singing the praises of Tr*mp.
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